(no subject)
I saw the most beautiful woman on the bus this morning. She must have been 75, tall and graceful with pure white white hair. If I live to be old (which I should become around, oh, 2050 or so) I want to have that much dignity and poise.
Both Colette and August left around 7:00 this morning. August's going to San Diego to see Mudge, and Colette's headed to Fort Collins to start college. I'm going to miss her. Not that I haven't been fortunate enough to always have pretty great roommates, but she's been one of the best. Definitely the most fun to live with. I hope kids will still come over and hang out even though she's gone (although part of me also suspects that this shift in living-arrangements is also going to herald a new phase of anti-social hermitage for me. After the past few awesome but hectic weeks, I kind of need it.)
Speaking of gatherings, the conversation I was having with Matthew, Tony and Sam last night has been percolating in my brain, so I ended up scribbling down some thoughts. Trying to clarify what I was attempting to express then ... although it's not entirely clear in my own mind, so this is still pretty sketchy.
For Matthew:
'Kay. So the point I was failing to get across last night was: It's not that I don't believe taxation is theft. It's just that I believe property is theft in the first place. So it just strikes me as silly to be really pissed off because some bigger and badder criminal is taking this stuff from me that I stole fair and square. I mean, sure, this understanding of the fundamentally-bad-business-practicing nature of government should probably motivate me to devise a better strategy for hiding my booty, if I care about holding onto it. But I'm not going to get all morally outraged about it.
See, I think we're operating from different base principles here - and coming from a principle in which people "deserve to get stuff for doing stuff", it makes sense to be angry rather than amused. But as long as we're rejecting metaphysics, what's the basis for this entitlement thing? There's no law of logic or physics that guarantees a return on your investments - regardless of whether you're investing a million dollars in real estate or eight hours a day into your job, you don't deserve a reward for investment. You're gambling. It's the potential for disproportionate gain that makes investment worth the risk of disproportionate loss.
And here's a spook I want to kill: The metaphysical belief that people "should" be externally rewarded for working. There's no necessary correlation between doing work and getting paid. Granted, money and other tangible, measurable goodies serve as nicely quantifiable and thus easy-to-comprehend incentives. Not because payment has some irreducible connection to the nature of work, though. It actually cheapens the value of work, since paying someone to work implies that doing the work isn't worthwhile and rewarding in and of itself. (And one of the problems with the current economy is that most available work isn't. On top of the fact that we're taught to understand all work as sacrifice.)
But tangible externally-motivating incentives operate by preying on and perpetuating neurotic and self-defeating elements of human psychology. The "value" of payment and property and the economic evaluation of human labor are themselves dependent on spooks.
There is, for example, one alternative possibility in which the impetus to "work" isn't external rewards, but rather an internal motivation to commit creative and compassionate acts of play because doing so is beautiful for its own sake. And everyone is allocated what they "deserve" - that is to say, genuine compassion and respect (which presumably then facilitates the acquisition of sufficient food, clothing, shelter, great sex and videogames) - not on the basis of having "earned" it, but by virtue of being human.
I realize - given a variety of spooks, historical precedents, and foibles of brain chemistry - that the above is a totally unrealistic ideal and that it smacks of communism, so, like I said, unrealistic ideal. My aim is not to try and counter your moral argument with equally untenable one of my own. It's just to illustrate that the painfully-fucked-upness of our economic game is rooted so, so deeply into our social systems and brains that the income tax, qua one particular little manifestation of said fundamental fucked conception of "value", is just too trivial to get worked up over.
It's not that the bullshit of the system doesn't make me angry. It's that the 16th Amendement doesn't strike me as a worthy foe.
I realize that it's stupid, and that it's a level which needs to be worked on simulatanesouly to all the other levels of crap. If you want to work on it, knock yourself out. It just doesn't inspire the kind of internalized perpetual-motion-machine passion in me that I need for optimal efficiency - and other things do. It would be much more effective for me to be working on, say, laws against prostitution. And that's not because of anything about criminal sex laws or about federal economic policy, it's because of something about me.
Which is why it's good that there are all sorts of intractably different people in the world, or nothing would ever get done.
Politically and intellectually, I can get behind not paying income tax as a conscientious act of protest. And I respect people who are passionate enough to go to jail over it, for example. But as a temporary possessor of objects, I really can't bring myself to pour a lot of my limited emotional resources into caring how much money I'm personally getting paid to do a job I would do for free anyway.
Getting pissed off about the deeply rooted and fundamentally horrible way that the system dehumanizes people and devours their souls? Hell yes.
Getting pissed off about income tax? Whatever.
It's sort of like caring a WHOLE LOT about my freedom to buy Colgate instead of Crest. It'd be a bad investment of my energy. (And to be honest, I think it's a bad investment of yours is too. But that's probably just some fetishistic aesthetic objection to watching you use your formidable and extremely attractive capacity for blowing things up against something as banal as a W-4 form. *g*)
Both Colette and August left around 7:00 this morning. August's going to San Diego to see Mudge, and Colette's headed to Fort Collins to start college. I'm going to miss her. Not that I haven't been fortunate enough to always have pretty great roommates, but she's been one of the best. Definitely the most fun to live with. I hope kids will still come over and hang out even though she's gone (although part of me also suspects that this shift in living-arrangements is also going to herald a new phase of anti-social hermitage for me. After the past few awesome but hectic weeks, I kind of need it.)
Speaking of gatherings, the conversation I was having with Matthew, Tony and Sam last night has been percolating in my brain, so I ended up scribbling down some thoughts. Trying to clarify what I was attempting to express then ... although it's not entirely clear in my own mind, so this is still pretty sketchy.
For Matthew:
'Kay. So the point I was failing to get across last night was: It's not that I don't believe taxation is theft. It's just that I believe property is theft in the first place. So it just strikes me as silly to be really pissed off because some bigger and badder criminal is taking this stuff from me that I stole fair and square. I mean, sure, this understanding of the fundamentally-bad-business-practicing nature of government should probably motivate me to devise a better strategy for hiding my booty, if I care about holding onto it. But I'm not going to get all morally outraged about it.
See, I think we're operating from different base principles here - and coming from a principle in which people "deserve to get stuff for doing stuff", it makes sense to be angry rather than amused. But as long as we're rejecting metaphysics, what's the basis for this entitlement thing? There's no law of logic or physics that guarantees a return on your investments - regardless of whether you're investing a million dollars in real estate or eight hours a day into your job, you don't deserve a reward for investment. You're gambling. It's the potential for disproportionate gain that makes investment worth the risk of disproportionate loss.
And here's a spook I want to kill: The metaphysical belief that people "should" be externally rewarded for working. There's no necessary correlation between doing work and getting paid. Granted, money and other tangible, measurable goodies serve as nicely quantifiable and thus easy-to-comprehend incentives. Not because payment has some irreducible connection to the nature of work, though. It actually cheapens the value of work, since paying someone to work implies that doing the work isn't worthwhile and rewarding in and of itself. (And one of the problems with the current economy is that most available work isn't. On top of the fact that we're taught to understand all work as sacrifice.)
But tangible externally-motivating incentives operate by preying on and perpetuating neurotic and self-defeating elements of human psychology. The "value" of payment and property and the economic evaluation of human labor are themselves dependent on spooks.
There is, for example, one alternative possibility in which the impetus to "work" isn't external rewards, but rather an internal motivation to commit creative and compassionate acts of play because doing so is beautiful for its own sake. And everyone is allocated what they "deserve" - that is to say, genuine compassion and respect (which presumably then facilitates the acquisition of sufficient food, clothing, shelter, great sex and videogames) - not on the basis of having "earned" it, but by virtue of being human.
I realize - given a variety of spooks, historical precedents, and foibles of brain chemistry - that the above is a totally unrealistic ideal and that it smacks of communism, so, like I said, unrealistic ideal. My aim is not to try and counter your moral argument with equally untenable one of my own. It's just to illustrate that the painfully-fucked-upness of our economic game is rooted so, so deeply into our social systems and brains that the income tax, qua one particular little manifestation of said fundamental fucked conception of "value", is just too trivial to get worked up over.
It's not that the bullshit of the system doesn't make me angry. It's that the 16th Amendement doesn't strike me as a worthy foe.
I realize that it's stupid, and that it's a level which needs to be worked on simulatanesouly to all the other levels of crap. If you want to work on it, knock yourself out. It just doesn't inspire the kind of internalized perpetual-motion-machine passion in me that I need for optimal efficiency - and other things do. It would be much more effective for me to be working on, say, laws against prostitution. And that's not because of anything about criminal sex laws or about federal economic policy, it's because of something about me.
Which is why it's good that there are all sorts of intractably different people in the world, or nothing would ever get done.
Politically and intellectually, I can get behind not paying income tax as a conscientious act of protest. And I respect people who are passionate enough to go to jail over it, for example. But as a temporary possessor of objects, I really can't bring myself to pour a lot of my limited emotional resources into caring how much money I'm personally getting paid to do a job I would do for free anyway.
Getting pissed off about the deeply rooted and fundamentally horrible way that the system dehumanizes people and devours their souls? Hell yes.
Getting pissed off about income tax? Whatever.
It's sort of like caring a WHOLE LOT about my freedom to buy Colgate instead of Crest. It'd be a bad investment of my energy. (And to be honest, I think it's a bad investment of yours is too. But that's probably just some fetishistic aesthetic objection to watching you use your formidable and extremely attractive capacity for blowing things up against something as banal as a W-4 form. *g*)